Ben
by Hermoth
Summary: A fic I've had sitting around for a while, but I needed a title before I could get it up- "Ben." Not the greatest title, but hey. Oh, yeah, the story- what if we switched around the three main 'Rama characters a bit, just for fun? Please read and review!
1. Chapter 1

Author's Note:

**What day is today,**

**It's John's birthday!**

**What a day for a birthday,**

**Let's all have some cake.**

**Yes, today is the forty-second birthday of John Dimaggio, who you should know voices Bender, Elzar, Randy, and some miscellaneous others :D You can bet that I'll be watching Futurama, trying to find the Bones episode that has John in it, and playing around with Bender soundboards all day. ^^**

**Happy birthday John, the totally awesome voice of Bender! 8D**

"Hey, Ben. Pizza going out! C'mon!"

Bender sighed impatiently, took a puff of his cigar, and grabbed the pizza box out of Mr. Panucci's hands.

"Those things'l kill you, y'know," his greasy employer told him, sucking a cigarette.

"Yeah, yeah, you're my boss, not my doctor," he snapped back, pushing the door open.

Outside, the young Mexican man hopped on his bike, pedaling down the street between revelers on the sidewalk. A cab pulled up with a screech and the window rolled down.

"Michelle. Hey, baby. What's up?" Bender asked the occupant of the cab, a young brunette.

"Bender, it's not workin-" she started to say.

"Yeah, well, anyways… I'm kinda tired of looking at your face. Not to say I don't like you, or whatever, but we're through." He started up his bike again with a push of his foot and sped past her stunned face, grinning to himself. _Beat you to it. I win the breakup!_

A building with flickering neon letters that spelled _Applied Cryogenics _came into view. Bender braked, locked up his bike, and made for the door.

"Happy New Year!" a guy yelled as he snipped the bike chain with pliers and took off on the pizza boy's bike.

"Hey! Bite my ass!" Bender hollered after him. "Jerk," he muttered as he pushed the door open, balancing the pizza box on his other open palm.

The elevator arrived with a _ding_, and he rode it to the 64th floor, enjoying the swooping feeling in his stomach as he rose.

Eerie metal pods lined the walls of the room he entered. The lights were off, and the place seemed empty. The pods were glass at the front, and visible inside were frozen people- nuts crazy enough to believe that cryogenics would enable them to reawaken in the far future.

"Hey! Anyone home?" he asked, knocking on a wall with dark, tanned knuckles. "Gotta pizza for… I.C. Weiner?" Bender rolled his eyes, unimpressed. "Can't you come up with anything better than that?"

He sat down at a chair in front of a desk and popped open a beer. "Here's to another millennium filled with jerks, assholes, and idiots."

Outside, bright numbers in Time Square counted down the seconds until the twentieth century would be left behind- ten… nine…. eight….

Bender reached into his pocket for a cigar, but what came out was a gaudy noisemaker.

"What the hell?" he said, annoyed. Seven… six… five…

He finished off the beer ceremoniously. Four… three…two….

Bender stuck the noisemaker in his mouth and blew it unenthusiastically.

"ONE!" the crowd in Time Square screamed.

The curl of the noisemaker bounced back, throwing off his balance just the tiniest bit, but it was enough. The chair slammed to the floor and the pizza boy did a neat backwards somersault into an open pod, the door slamming shut.

The dial was set for a thousand years.

"Holy shit! I'm going to sue your asses-" he howled before he was frozen in a flash. Frost crept up his jeans and his stylish black leather jacket, misting over each of the studs on the back. Rime crusted his thick, dark eyelashes and turned his black hair silvery.

Time passed outside the window- hundreds and hundreds of years. Ten hundred years, to be exact. Civilization fell to alien lasers, once, twice, finally regenerating in weird, rounded buildings and a network of green tubes. The bizarre structures sprung up around the cryogenics building like flowers from the ground.

Finally, the door of Bender's pod opened with a hiss and a puff of cold steam. The occupant stumbled out, coughing. The large glass window drew his eye, displaying an unfamiliar city of brightly colored, rounded buildings.

"Oh your god! It's the future!" he exclaimed, leaning forward into the glass. "All the jerkwads I used to know… I'll never see any of them again. Whoohoo!"

Two men in lab coats entered the room. "Welcome to the world of tomorrow!" said the blonde one melodramatically.

"Why do you always have to say it that way?" the other complained.

"Haven't you ever heard of a little thing called showmanship?" the first man turned to Bender. "Come. Your destiny awaits!"

"Yeah, yeah," Bender grumbled. "Great. The future is as dumb as the past."

The two technicians left the newly unfrozen pizza boy outside a room.

"Have a nice future," they told him, and the door slid open.

"Ah, jeez. It's like that crappy show," Bender said, looking upward from his position in the doorway. The door slid closed on his head. "Ow!"

Rubbing a growing lump beneath his black hair, he entered the room. A man in a black uniform stood in front of a window, his back to Bender.

"Oh, hi!" he said, turning around. With a jolt, Bender realized that he had one gigantic eye in the middle of his forehead and red hair spiked into two prongs in the front.

"Freak," he muttered.

"What? Is it the hair?" the cyclops asked nervously.

"Yes, Ginger, it's the hair. That's definitely your oddest feature," he replied crossly. "Idiot."

"What's your name?" asked the redhead. "I'm Fry."

"Bender Rodriguez," Bender answered.

"Oh," replied Fry. "Can I call you Ben?"

"No. So what's with the eye, freako?"

"I'm an alien, the only one of my kind here on Earth."

"So, there are other inhabited planets other than Earth now?"

The redhead looked at him strangely. "Weren't there always?"

Bender rolled his eyes and sighed. "Not my fault you flunked history. What am I supposed to be doing here? Not chatting with you, I suppose?"

"Oh yeah!" said Fry, slapping his forehead. "I'm supposed to put you on the probie-majiggy."

"You know… let's skip that part," said the other man nervously, eyeing a platform which sat under a series of long, probie-looking things of various shapes and sizes.

"Well, I think I'm supposed to strip you naked and let the thingies probe you. It's in my job description."

"I'm… uh… allergic to probing."

"Oh, alright then. I'll just put some finger skin stuff in this machine that tells you if you have any living relatives," Fry said, scraping a bit off Bender's thumb and running it under a scanner.

"So, what's the verdict? Do I have any relatives to mooch off of?"

"Yeah," replied the cyclops, handing Bender a printout. "Professor Hubert J. Farnsworth, and he looks like an easy mooching target, too."

The picture on the printout was of an old man with coke-bottle glasses and a pointy, wrinkled head, presumably Professor Farnsworth.

"Aaaand your permanent career assignment," Fry added, turning around a projection that hung in midair. It read: DELIVERY BOY.

"Eh, could be worse. At least it pays well," Bender shrugged. "Y'know, Fry, I like you. You're dumb enough to fall for my scams and still like me afterwards. I think we could be friends," Bender said to the inept cryogenic technician, who smiled at him.

"Friends it is," he said, holding out his hand, which Bender shook.

"Fry, of all my friends… you're the first."

The redhead smiled wider and let go of the other man's darker hand after holding on for a little too long. "Could you hold out your palm? I need to insert your career chip," he said, reaching for a hellish mechanism with two spikes facing each other, with a space wide enough for a hand in between.

Bender took one look at the device, said "Bye, buddy," and ran.

**If you like, please review :D If I get enough encouraging reviews, I'll continue it- and if I do, you can expect a bending unit Leela! ;3**


	2. Chapter 2

**Bender seems to be doing a hella lotta running. Well, I guess Fry did in the pilot, too. Now it's Bender's turn. Only fair :P Thank you reviewers! :D**

Panting, Bender skidded around a corner outside of the cryogenics building.

"The future _sucks_," he gasped out loud.

"Hey, sure beats the past," commented a passerby.

As he ran, he looked down at the piece of paper still clutched in his hand. _Hubert J. Farnsworth_. It had a phone number on it under the name.

"Huh. My only connection in the future," Bender muttered to himself. "Better start mooching." He spotted a line in front of what appeared to be a telephone booth, and cut in front of a woman.

"Hey!" the woman he had just cut said indignantly. "You cut me, you jerk!"

He turned around, ready to give the lady a piece of his mind, when he noticed that she was, in fact, not a lady, but made completely of shiny grey metal. Sure, she had all the curves, but her round, yellow eyes were encased in a visor and the fingers she tapped angrily against her hip clanked loudly. A large, flashy ponytail grew from the back of her head and shone purple in the sun, and her feet had been made in the shape of large combat boots.

"Whoa, a robot," he said.

"That's so perceptive of you. Now, go to the back of the line," she told him contemptuously.

"Lady, Bender listens to no woman, metal or not," Bender replied, turning back around and crossing his arms.

"_Hi-yah_!" one of the fembot's heavy metal boots thumped the cocky delivery boy hard in the back and sent him flying into the booth.

"Gotta work on my aim," she muttered, following him in. "Look, I'm in a hurry here, so I'll just pay for both of us, alright?"

She inserted a coin, and the speakers in the booth crackled as the door slid shut.

"_Please select your mode of death_," an absurdly pleasant voice said. _"'Quick and Painless' or 'Slow and Horrible'_?"

"Yeah, I'd like to place a collect call," Bender replied, leaning against the wall casually.

"_You have selected 'Slow and Horrible_'_._"

"Nice choice," the fembot commended him, holding out a metallic hand. "My name's Leela."

A hatch opened up beneath the speakers and an array of blades and torture instruments grew outward in a tangled, glittering mass.

Bender shrieked, and slammed himself into Leela, pinning her behind him against the wall as the collection of blades began moving and stabbing the air where they'd just been. He'd really only meant to save himself, but this was fine, too.

"Let me go!" Leela growled, trying to shove him off. The torture instruments disappeared back into the wall.

"_You are now dead_," the voice informed the gasping man and the angry fembot. "_Thank you for using Stop-'N-Drop, America's favorite suicide booth since 2008_."

"What's your problem, you crazy bitch? I mean, the future's bad, but not _that _bad. I mean, I bet everyone's forgot about _The Final Sacrifice_."

"They haven't," replied Leela.

"Oh, gawd, _no_," Bender moaned, falling to his knees. "Why didn't I let that machine kill me?"

"Stop whining and let's go. Do you want to get a drink? It's not like I had anything else planned for today."

The pub that Leela chose was O'Zorgnax's, a dim little place with a _Happy New Year _sign across the front window. Leela bought them both drinks, after Bender made her feel guilty about how he'd been taken away from his family and friends in the past, and now, on top of that, he had no futuristic money.

The bartender slammed their mugs on the counter. "Thanks, Leela," Bender said sincerely. "_Sucker_."

"So, I bet you're wondering why I wanted to commit suicide," the fembot said abruptly.

"Nope."

"Oh." She looked disappointed. "Can I tell you anyway?"

_Sigh_. "If you absolutely have to."

Leela's eyes brightened a bit. "Well, I'm a bender. I bend girders for a living. That's what I was built for. But yesterday, I found out that all the girders I'd been bending were used to make suicide booths."

Bender raised an eyebrow. "So you decided to take a stand by… using one of those same booths to kill yourself?"

"Yeah," the robot sighed. "It made a bit more sense at the time. It was just awful, realizing that I'd been inadvertently responsible for so many people's deaths."

"People who commit suicide are idiots," Bender declared, ignoring Leela's glare. "It's natural selection, if you ask me."

Leela's eyes narrowed even more, and then regained all three-hundred and sixty degrees in surprise. "Who's that one eyed, pronged hair idiot pressing his face against the window?"

"Ah, crap," Bender said, taking one look at Fry and the palm-piercing contraption in his hand and running out the door.

"Where the hell are you going?" the fembot yelled, jogging a couple feet behind the delivery boy in the street, her heavy metal boots nearly cracking the sidwalk. Fry was still at the bar, staring in the window, oblivious.

"No idea."


End file.
